Hora, Priya2021-06-292021-06-292020-06https://hdl.handle.net/11299/220601University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation.June 2020. Major: Civil Engineering. Advisor: William Arnold. 1 computer file (PDF); vi, 157 pages.Contaminants of emerging concern (CECs) are common household and industrial chemicals that have increasingly and frequently been detected in wastewater treatment plants and in wastewater effluent impacted water bodies. Pharmaceuticals, personal care products, and disinfectants are amongst the myriad potentially recalcitrant, unregulated organic contaminants that are detected in the environment and actively being studied to assess their fate and toxicity risk. The goals of this dissertation are to evaluate different attenuation mechanisms of select pharmaceutical compounds and cationic surfactants in: engineered systems (namely during ultraviolet light-based advanced oxidation processes) and natural systems (namely by sunlight photolysis and microbial transformation). The resulting information will allow for prediction of contaminant lifetimes in these various systems and identify relevant treatment and transformation phenomena.enThesis or Dissertation